Unmasked
by SandboxWriting
Summary: The desert is a lonely place if you're young and a little lost. Nel goes searching for something she can't name. Nel, Pesshe, Tesla, Nnoitra. NelielxTesla.


"You hide in the thame plaith every time, Peththe!"

"What are you yelling at me for?" Pesshe asks indignantly. "Dondochakka doesn't even hide! He just lies facedown in the sand!"

"He blendth in."

"He has red patches_._ There are _polka dots_ on him. He does anything but blend."

"Hith back ith thandy yellow! He blendth!" Nel glares at Pesshe with all the intensity her young eyes can muster. "Bethideth, he lieth down in _different plaitheth_. I at leatht have to turn my head to find him."

Pesshe sighs. "Fine then, little miss smart-ass. I'd like to see you try and hide. The only here things here are trees, and even I'm not that skinny."

"I will, thtupid," Nel says, and grins. "My turn. Count to... three hundred thith time!"

"Okay. Go."

Nel dashes off as Pesshe counts out loud. As soon as she's out of earshot he breaks off his counting.

"She hasn't grown at all, ya know."

"Yeah," he says absently, watching Nel run.

"I thought she might, Pesshe."

He turns to Dondochakka then, and he feels a little smaller. The weight he's been ignoring, hiding-- it's back now, hunching his shoulders. "Me too," he says, "but maybe it's better this way. She'd get bored faster if she were older, and then we'd really be screwed."

Dondochakka laughs. "Yeah. That would be tough, ya know? As if hiding an ex-Espada weren't enough to deal with."

"Mm," Pesshe says in agreement. "We should go find her. Maybe if we head farther out-- a new area--"

"Uh. Pesshe. Isn't it your turn to keep track of her today?"

He snaps his head around and scans the horizon.

Nothing.

"_SHIT_."

... ... ... ... ...

She's really running now; she can barely even feel the sand under her feet. Be lazy, will they? She'll show them how you're supposed to play the game. You have to move fast, fast enough to get away from

_that crescent blade, lashing out again_

peeking eyes. She knows they watch where she hides. That's no fun.

Up ahead is a dead place. She saw it weeks--months--however long ago they passed by it for the first time, and stored it away in her head for the next time she wanted to be alone. There were lots of tiny Hollows there, then. She can't sense reiatsu worth a damn, but she saw them, little quick lizard-things crawling over ruined walls and crumbling pillars.

It's huge. Big enough for lots of people to play in. She wanted to stop, when she saw it, but Pesshe muttered _too close _ and they kept riding. She's not sure what it's close to

_blood on the ground_

but the tiny Hollows were cute, and she wants to see them. To have a moment to breathe. So she's here.

She walks in among the stones, some of them taller than she is. She doesn't see anything moving, but there are trails in the sand where tails swept back and forth, so they can't have gone far. She's picking up a smaller rock to peer under it when she hears a voice echo through the remains of a hallway--

"--so small."

"Hey, the man said to clear the place out. Just doin' my given duty."

She freezes, and makes herself as tiny as she can, remembering what Pesshe and Dondochakka have drilled into her a thousand times--you must not be found. You CANNOT be found. There are people who will hurt you just because they can

_and some who have already done so_

and so you have to be small, small so they don't see you, so they don't feel you, so they won't care.

"Are they really getting in our way?"

Without conscious thought, she's moving closer, creeping alongside a low wall. She hasn't heard a new voice in-- she doesn't think she's ever heard a new voice. Sometimes she wonders if she and her brothers aren't the only ones alive in the whole dead world.

"You questioning Aizen-_sama_? I'm sure he'd love to hear that."

"..."

She lifts her head up slowy, peering over an outcropping of stone. Stay small, she reminds herself, stay calm.

There are two people not fifty yards from where she hides. One faces slightly away from her, sitting on an upturned stone chair; his lanky legs sprawl over the ground in front of him. The other stands, looking at the ground, dirty blonde hair covering his face. Through some acoustic trick, the remains of a domed ceiling carry their words straight to her ears.

"Another one? Fuck. These things just don't know when to stay outta sight." The thin one makes a sudden swipe at the ground, and his hand comes up with a small struggling creature, one of the tiny hollows she's been looking for.

"It's not even worth the trouble to fuckin' eat it," he drawls, and she sees a hint of a grin stretch the side of his face. He pulls his arm back suddenly and flings the Hollow towards a hole in the ceiling. She doesn't hear it hit the edge of the hole, but she _feels_ the life go out of it, sees it crumble into nothing before it hits the ground.

"Che. Missed."

She stops her gasp, but can't stop her heart beating faster, fluttering. She can't stop herself from _reaching _ out to look for any other fragile things, to warn them--

--and he **sees** her with his one good eye, the standing one, he can't possibly miss that shock of green hair against the dirty grey stone.

She's frozen. Dead. Lost. She can't move, can't breathe, and he is looking

_right into her eyes. He's different, Tesla, from the one he follows around. Nnoitra only really looks at her in anger, and even then he's not seeing her, he's seeing what she is to him-- a means to an end. His end._

_She sees him watching them fight, knows he won't step in, won't assist, won't challenge her. She's not sure why until she gives Nnoitra that half-true speech about reason, and then she sees something else in his eyes-- respect, and a little fear. She doesn't know which was there in the beginning. _

_She goes to him, because he'll never go to her, masks her reiatsu and finds him in the dead of their always-night. What they have is strange, odd, secret, but she adores it, holds onto it the way he holds her: gently, delicately. Not one other soul has ever dreamt of treating her as one might treat something precious, something fragile._

_He tells her she's beautiful. He won't say that he loves her, and she doesn't know if she'd believe him if he did. They cannot have children, Arrancar, and by extension no family, no other halves. They are all broken, in subtly different ways, and no two pieces can make a whole--but the two of them come close to doing so. Maybe the closest, though they never know it. _

_He's there when she fights, and in the aftermath. She knows he's there because he holds a certain type of loyalty to her sometime-enemy, but she appreciates it all the same. _

_He's there in the darkest parts of the night, when she goes searching, and in those times she knows he's only there for her._

_He isn't there when she feels cornered, and reaches out for him, for something to hold on to. He isn't there when her fraccion fall at her feet, or when she turns (too late) and feels a sudden _

sharp pain in her head, and she _knows _he's noticed her now, somehow she feels his disbelief through the buzzing confusion in her mind.

He's looking at her, and the thin man in front of him, Nnoitra

_had told him to take care of it, so he did. Now more than ever it was important, essential that he was loyal, that he showed no weaknesses, nothing to make Nnoitra go looking for reasons behind any oddities. So he did not falter when he lost an eye to a lucky claw, did not stop fighting until they were all finished. Gone. _

_He returned, blood-soaked and tired, to find Nnoitra stalking through the hallways, grin stretching nearly from ear to ear. He made his report and retired to his room, sitting up long after he had finished cleaning up. _

_She did not find him._

_He was alone all the long nights after that. She was not mentioned. She was missing, gone. He knew, knew somehow who had made her disappear, and anger grew in his gut as he realized that Nnoitra might have known, must have known._

_He did nothing. What could he have done? She was _

there, right there, and he hardly notices how small she is, how the spark of recognition in her eyes is nearly extinguished by cloudy confusion.

"What? Is there another one?"

He snaps back to Nnoitra, who stares at him with a bored grin. "Point me. I need some target practice."

He doesn't know what to do, can't think what to say, how to save her.

There's a _flicker_ on the edge of his awareness, and then bony arms grab her, pull her down and away. That swatch of color vanishes. Nnoitra notices it too, though, stands and turns with a hoarse "th'FUCK?"

"Hollow," he manages to say. "I thought I felt something a little larger. It may have eaten your leftovers."

Nnoitra glares at him for a minute that stretches on and on. Finally, his shoulders relax, double-moon blade drops back at his side. "Speak up sooner, Tesla. Your skills ain't any good if they don't come with th' brain to use 'em."

He nods, but his mind is miles away.

Later, he sits alone, looking out over the desert. He watches the moon stand still and tries his hardest to forget her. What she was. What she meant to him.

Eventually, he succeeds.

... ... ... ... ...

"I don't know them," she says, the first words she's spoken since Pesshe scooped her up and took her away from that dead dome.

No answer. Pesshe and Dondochakka are still holding their hushed conference.

She feels suddenly and desperately alone."I did know them," she says. She doesn't mean it then. She's just looking for something, anything, to get their attention, but they don't hear her.

She turns it over and over in her head until it starts to have the ring of something true.


End file.
